


this is not a fucking love song

by sevensevan



Category: Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. (TV)
Genre: Angst, Canon Compliant, Canonical Character Death, Character Study, F/F, F/M, Unrequited Love
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-02-25
Updated: 2018-02-25
Packaged: 2019-03-23 23:31:46
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,114
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13798641
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/sevensevan/pseuds/sevensevan
Summary: Sometimes Daisy wishes she never met Jemma.





	this is not a fucking love song

**Author's Note:**

> i wrote this in half an hour at like two in the morning instead of working on my skimmons full length because i have no self control. daisy's characterization in here is a pretty big departure from canon, though, because i was working on my full length before this and daisy in that is way different from canon, and my version of her definitely came through in this. some things: this is pretty much entirely canon compliant in terms of fitz and jemma's relationship, which is where the unrequited love tag comes from. there's also mentions of miles/skye and daisy/lincoln, but i didn't cover skyeward because we pretend ward doesn't exist in this house. there's even a little bit of quakerider because honestly, we deserved more robbie reyes than we got. anyway. i hope you enjoy. title from in vain from shinigami.

You run away six times before you turn eighteen.

Every one is a new mark in your file, another strike against you, a drop in the chances of you ever being adopted, ever even being fostered in a good home. No good home will take a girl who can’t stay in one place. But you gave up hope of _any_ home a long time ago, so you run. And every time, you get a little better at it. It takes them a few more hours, a few more days to find you. And then you pack your clothes in a garbage bag on your eighteenth birthday and buy a bus ticket to Texas with all the money you have, because there’s nothing for you here, nothing for you _anywhere_ , and you think that if you’re going to be doomed you might as well be doomed far away from the dirty streets and polluted air of LA.

Dallas isn’t much better, but the time moves slower and the people are smaller, so you stay. You meet a boy named Miles who tries to give you a purpose, and it doesn’t work, not really, but since you’re just killing time before you die you decide to stay with him, get high in his bedroom and hack government agencies for the fun of it and talk about changing the world.

(You cannot change the world. You are small and powerless and there’s a timer above your head, counting down the seconds until you fade into nothing. Miles is the same, but he cannot see it, and his stubborn obliviousness is comforting. So you stay.)

You stay in Dallas until you can’t bear it anymore. Time moves slowly and you used to want that, used to want nothing but _more time_ , but you’re doing nothing with it and you find yourself praying it would move faster. So you leave Miles and leave the apartment that’s supposed to feel like home but never has, and this time you have a van full of things instead of a plastic bag, but it still feels empty and you still feel meaningless. You go back to LA with a vague hope that everything will be over soon.

You join S.H.I.E.L.D. with the sort of half-hearted purposelessness you’ve done most things with. You have a faint idea of finding your parents; it’s as good a way as any to kill time. You tell Coulson you want to be a field agent, because drugs have stopped making you feel anything and meaningless adrenaline would be better than nothing.

Simmons is the most intensely _alive_ person on the Bus. You watch from a distance without looking too closely, because she’s _bright bright bright_ , all color and sound and feeling, and you’re pretty sure you’ll go blind if you meet her eyes.

And somehow, you survive. You shoot a teenage boy in the forehead from hundreds of feet away, and you don’t feel anything. You watch Simmons run across the deck of a ship, and somewhere inside of you, you desperately, fervently hope that she makes it through this, that she still glows with life when she comes home.

(She does.)

Simmons comes home and you find your parents and there’s a moment, sitting across from your father at dinner, that you think _maybe_. But Cal is still a psychotic murderer, and Jiaying turns out to be just as insane, and you end up with two evil parents instead of none and a power that makes your skin crawl, because Simmons looks at you with fear in her eyes and you cannot imagine what you could do with this power but _destroy_.

In the end, Jiaying gets to die and Cal gets to start over, and it’s beautiful and horrible and destined that everybody has peace in the end except you.

You change your name because you don’t feel like Skye anymore, because Skye was a broken and empty orphan who loved nothing, and you are still hollow and lost but you love Simmons and you wanted to love your parents. You kind of do, somewhere inside you, so you tell your team to call you Daisy and ignore the way the name makes you flinch for the first few weeks.

Simmons disappears into the monolith, and you always knew how Fitz felt about her but now it’s more evident than ever, because she’s gone and he’s broken glass, and you think you would be too if you hadn’t been shattered and swept up and thrown to the wind years ago. She’s gone for months and you keep going, and you take the hardest, most dangerous missions and use your powers recklessly and relish the feeling of your bones cracking beneath your skin, because at least it’s a _feeling_. Because if you’re lucky you’ll get killed, and surely _that_ will feel like _something_.

Fitz drags Simmons back out of the monolith, and she’s beautiful but she doesn’t glow anymore. You bring her flowers and somewhere between making eye contact across the deck of a ship and setting daisies on her nightstand she had become _Jemma_ , not Simmons. She takes the flowers and smiles at you, and it’s weak and scared but not scared of _you_ , and you decide right then that if she can’t glow the way she used to, you will find it in yourself to stop just surviving and _live_ , live until she sees you doing it and learns how to live all over again.

And you do it. You kiss Lincoln and you feel _something_ , and it isn’t much but it’s there and that’s more than you’ve ever had before. You drink with Bobbi and Hunter, and Mack after they’re gone, and you listen to them talk about the things they’re fighting for and for the first time, you feel like something _matters_ , like what you’re doing is real. Bobbi tells you at some point between fourth and fifth beers that she wants to be remembered, and it strikes a chord in you.

You keep putting yourself in danger, keep killing, but now you’re _fighting_. You’re fighting to _live_ , not to survive. You blow through walls and shatter windows and shake the earth with your hands, and you look at yourself in the mirror one morning and you see a person looking back. Not a half-withered skeleton wrapped in skin, not a broken toy, but a _person_.

And the whole time, you’re doing it for Jemma. You’re learning to live, learning to _feel_ , and the entire time, she’s falling in love with Fitz.

And _God_ , that’s some kind of irony, isn’t it?

Hive takes you, and you could fight it, probably. But you’ve taught yourself to feel and all you’re feeling now is a bitter pain that you have no right to, because you’re so goddamned _good_ at lying that Jemma has no idea that you’re in love with her. So you let Hive take you, because he turns the feelings off and you don’t know how to do that yourself anymore.

Hive takes you and Lincoln dies because of it, and he tells you he loves you before he dies. You don’t know if you feel more guilty for his death or for the fact that you let him fall in love with you, because _that_ was never going to end in anything but a tragedy.

So you run away. You’ve always been good at running. And for the first time, it feels like running away from home.

You’re starting to think your life is some sort of cosmic joke. Someone has put a lot of effort into filling it with irony. The first time you realize that you _have_ a home is when you lose it.

You rob a bank and collapse a bridge and get labeled a terrorist, and it’s all for a good cause because you can’t stomach hurting people senselessly anymore. Because you _feel_ now, and you can’t make it go away.

(Some days you wish you never met Jemma.)

You meet a man named Robbie Reyes and you think that maybe, in another life where you don’t love a girl who you ran away from, in a life where the lines are blurred and the morals are clear instead of the other way around, you could love him. But maybe it’s good that you met in this life, because he’s far too much like you and you two together could destroy the world.

You reunite with Jemma in an apartment you bought for her and Fitz, because she’s glowing again and you don’t want her to ever stop, and if that means breaking your own heart a thousand times over you’d do it in a heartbeat. Because it’s _Jemma_ , and she still looks at you like you’re worth something.

You go back to S.H.I.E.L.D. eventually. You hurt just as much there as everywhere else, but Jemma looks happier, so it doesn’t matter. You watch Jemma and Fitz be in love, and Mack gives you sympathetic looks when they’re around. He never says a word, but he doesn’t have to.

You kneel beside Jemma as robot versions of your friends hunt you down, and you tell her everything you can think of to convince her that she can do this, that she can _fix_ this, and you almost tell her the truth right there.

You say something about Fitz, instead of saying _I’m in love with you_.

You fall into a world where you work for Hydra and Ward is a good man, and Jemma tells you that she crawled out of a grave when she got there. You find that more fitting than you probably should. Not even death can stop Jemma from _living_.

The Framework is a nightmare, but while you’re there, Jemma looks at you like you’re the most important thing she has. You know that it’s because you’re the _only_ thing she has there, but that doesn’t stop you from letting her gaze chase some of your ever-present pain away.

Of course, the moment she has the real Fitz back, it all comes pouring back. You don’t blame her, not even a little bit; she loves him and not you. She has never loved you and that is not her fault, and maybe it’s not yours, either. Maybe you were built to love her and she was built to love him, and whichever deity has a grudge against your soul decided to write you into a tragedy.

(Either way, whether it’s fault or fate, it hurts the same.)

When you’re kidnapped into the future and Deke calls you the _Destroyer of Worlds_ , you’re not surprised. Not even a little bit. You run away from everything. It’s fight or flight, and you always, _always_ run.

You must’ve found something you couldn’t run from.

Jemma asks Fitz to marry her, and it shouldn’t surprise you, it _doesn’t_ surprise you, but your heart still feels like dust inside your chest.

When you make it to the Zephyr, on the surface, you sit across from Robin and only one question springs to mind.

“Jemma?” you say softly, almost in a whisper. Robin stares at you, simultaneously wise, hardened by tragedy, and childishly innocent. “Jemma?” you repeat.

“Daisy loved her until the end,” Robin says, not even aware that you are the one asking the question.

“But does she love me?” you ask. You already know the answer, but you ask anyway. You were never good at avoiding things that would hurt you.

Robin stares at you, blankly. You get up and walk away.

(Somewhere behind Robin is a drawing of a gauntleted hand holding a bare one, a bare hand with no wedding ring, no tan line where one would rest. You don’t see it.)

(Someday, you think, you will tell her. You will sit across from Jemma and tell her about a broken toy in a human body and a glowing girl who showed her how to _live_. Jemma will hold your hand and tell you that she’s sorry, and she will mean it because she’s Jemma and for some reason she’s always looked at you like you matter, and you will feel the cold metal of her wedding ring against your fingers, and you will feel more than you were ever supposed to, and the world will crack and shatter beneath you, because you are selfish and broken and trying to fix yourself with a vague notion of love and a few friends was like putting band-aids over bullet holes and praying for a cure.

You don’t know why you ever thought you could be saved.)

**Author's Note:**

> there ya go. i don't write second person that much so any feedback would be nice. i'm on tumblr @daisys-quake and my fic requests are always open. my full length skimmons fic is coming eventually, so keep an eye out for that. leave a comment and kudos if you enjoyed.


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